Posts tagged gamasutra

A recent Gamasutra piece chronicled a monetization design consultant's journey into what he calls a "social elder game." Author Ethan Levy participated in multiple high-end, time-limited guild-vs.-guild events in an unnamed online game to see just how much guild members would need to pay out to kee...

When Intel pulled advertising from the business-focused gaming website Gamasutra earlier this week, it was due in large part to an internet campaign to hit gaming websites that speak out against sexism in the industry where it hurts: ad revenue. Today, the chipset manufacturer has announced an apo...

What does your character name say about you? Gaming website Gamasutra asked that question while performing a massive investigation on player names in World of Warcraft, and came up with some interesting answers. Obviously a game like World of Warcraft is going to have a ton of unique character nam...

UBM Tech has decided to end print publication of Game Developer magazine with its July 2013 issue. The company also notes it will be ceasing distribution of digital issues. So, in short, Game Developer magazine is done after 19 years. Legacy content will shift over to 'Game Developer on Gamasutra' ...

A new blog post at Gamasutra gives an interesting perspective on EVE Online's economic trends and how they translate to real life. Virtual World Economist Ramin Shokrizade writes about his time helping CCP build the game's economy in the early days and how land tax and real estate bubbles can (an...

Do those scruffy-looking nerfherder freeloaders (like many of us here at Massively) actually contribute value to an MMO? A new article at Gamasutra argues that yes, they do, and in fact are necessary to a free-to-play game's monetary success.
"If you are going straight after this demographic a...

Valve tends to keep as hush-hush as possible on a number of things, not least of which are matters of personnel. So EconTalk's chat with the company's economist, Yanis Varoufakis, in which he explains in elucidating detail how the company hires, fires, and pays its employees, is particularly enligh...

Gas Powered Games, the studio behind Age of Empires and a handful of other titles, has hopped on the Kickstarter train. Wildman hit Kickstarter today and has 32 days to hit its $1,100,000 goal. The game is an three-way action RPG/RTS/MOBA hybrid. GPG CEO Chris Taylor told Gamasutra that he's ba...

Gamasutra's Simon Ludgate lays into the makers of Star Wars: The Old Republic with a recent article that takes a look at all the things BioWare did wrong with the greatly hyped MMO.
"SWTOR's 'end-game' was anemic at best, especially compared to the well-received storyline content." Ludgate wri...

If you're looking for just one reason why Glitch is sunsetting, you're out of luck. If you're looking for many, many reasons why Glitch failed, then all you have to do is pull up a chair in front of Tiny Speck's Stewart Butterfield and listen to him talk. Butterfield spoke with Gamasutra about th...

If you were just thinking that the world needed another Massively Online Battle Arena (MOBA) based on a previous game IP, the team at Visceral Games may have read your mind. The Dead Space and Dante's Inferno dev studio has posted a handful of tell-tale job listings on the Gamasutra job boards th...

MMOs as a rule tend to have a focus on providing content for us, the players. It makes sense; they want us to play their games, so they give us as much stuff to do as possible so that we'll keep playing. But why do we want to do that stuff in the first place? Craig Morrison, creative director at ...

Do you believe that the MMO genre has been stuck in a rut over the past few years? So does Christopher Lye, the global brand director for ArenaNet, who publicly denounced the post-World of Warcraft trend in the industry as stagnant.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Lye stated that Guild Wars 2 ...

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks.
Data breaches cost a l...

As 2012 rolls in, many gamers are rejoicing that they might make it to a year that Diablo III actually releases. Blizzard's action-RPG will certainly be a hit on the PC, although console fans may have more hope today that Diablo III could reach the shores of their platform.
According to a job ...

Free-to-play is on the rise -- we all knew that, but perhaps we didn't quite grasp how much it's gone up. Gamasutra reports that online players have boosted their F2P spending a whopping 24% this year over last, with F2P revenues cornering 47 in 2010 -- of the MMO market in the US.
Analysts pr...

BioWare Mythic says that the market is big enough to support both free-to-play and subscription models -- and everything else in between. Talking with Gamasutra, GM Eugene Evans said that the company has to acknowledge that there are people who don't like F2P and those who do, and it's important ...

Sony Online Entertainment's most glorious shining star in its MMO library has another merit badge for its sash today. Free Realms just toppled the 20 million player mark, which includes all registrations since the game launched in 2009. This number reflects both PC and PlayStation 3 users.
Joh...

You could rely on your friends, game critics or helpful GameStop sales associates to tell you which games are scary, but that's so two-thousand-and-late. We're sticking with science, thanks to this helpful feature from Gamasutra, which used player feedback and biometric data to rate not only the ...

Even though the PC-using EVE Online and the PlayStation 3-playing DUST 514 gamers may be separated by platform boundaries, CCP fans in both worlds will be joined at the hip in an odd, first-of-its-kind symbiotic relationship when DUST 514 launches. It's an intriguing prospect, but fans are wonder...